HIGH CONCEPT BOOKS

What is high-concept?
Essentially, a book with an extra-strong hook. A high-concept novel is one which is easy to sell because the idea has wow factor and is easy to explain very quickly. The wow factor often comes from a sense of, “Why didn’t I think of that? That’s going to sell in shedloads. Damn it.” 

Sometimes, in a high-concept book, the premise will sound unbelievable, which is part of the sit-up-and-notice factor. Snakes on a Plane is a film with a high-concept idea – you almost feel you must go and see it just to discover how such a wacky idea could be a film. You may still wonder once you’ve seen it, but at least they’ve got your money by then. (Hooking sometimes hurts the fish.)
  
In a high-concept book the stakes are often high, at least for that main character(s) if not for the whole world. Your main character needing to lose weight in time to fit into a holiday bikini is not high stakes. The end of the world being nigh, or a man needing to save his son’s life, are very high stakes, for the world and for the man and his son respectively.

Below are some books which would be classed as high-concept. In each case, the essence is easy to explain briefly, they have a sit-up-and-notice factor and high stakes, and they were very successful in terms of both critical acclaim and sales. (Though critical acclaim is not necessary for high-concept.)

Life of Pi by Yann Martel – boy ship-wrecked on powerless boat with dying zebra, hyena and tiger called Richard Parker.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon – an autistic savant with a fear of yellow finds a dead dog and sets out to solve its killing.


The Road by Cormac McCarthy – a man will do anything to avoid having to kill his young son, as they flee across America in the horrifying aftermath of global warming. Civilisation has died but they must keep hope alive.

Note, however, that your book does not have to be high-concept for it to be published, so don’t go hunting high-concept at the expense of good writing. In fact, if every book were high-concept, reading would become a nightmare of over-excitement. But if you do happen to come up with such an idea, it is more likely to fit the “what publishers want” category. And I am insanely jealous of you and may have to consider killing you.

Oh, by the way, do NOT say in your covering letter or query, "My novel is fabulously high-concept." This is for them to judge and you to grin smugly about in a place where they can't see you.

LUCK AND IDEAS

I've been thinking about luck a lot recently. Partly because my new novel, Wasted, is about huge and unpredictable effects of tiny “lucky” chances on our lives, and because, luckily, it's gaining wonderful reviews and feedback. And partly ...

Hang on a sec - did I say "luckily"? Why do we talk about luck so loosely? Doesn't a book get good reviews because people liked it? Unless I bribed the reviewers, which I didn't, or even asked my friends or relatives to write them, which I didn't. 

Our lives and successes are a tangled mixture of luck - from the moment of our conception, and before that from the moment when our parents met, and back to when their parents met, and ... - combined with effort and talent. And you could even say that having the personality to make the effort or the genes and environment to produce the luck are down to luck. You could take this argument to an absurd and dangerous conclusion. So, I won't.

When I was doing my blog tour for Wasted, one of the guest posts I did was for Kath Langrish, a fabulous and thoughtful writer. She asked me to write about the part that luck plays in how to be published. As I said there, "Everyone says you need luck to get published. If you’re struggling / failing, it’s tempting to blame bad luck: you’re talented, hard-working, and deserving, but the luck fairy hasn’t sprinkled stardust on you yet." I then go on to point out that,

"Actually you don’t NEED luck. Of the three elements of getting published – talent, perseverance and luck – you only need two, any two. If you have talent and you persevere for long enough, you won’t need luck. Think about throwing dice, trying to throw a double six. You could be lucky first time; but otherwise, if you throw the dice often enough, eventually you WILL throw a double six. That’s not luck: it’s perseverance."

Before you contradict that, do go and see how I argue it and what I say next.

But that's not what I want to say about luck today.

I'd like you to consider two important things you need in order to become published, and the part luck plays in them. And,more importantly, how you can and must control that luck.

1. The initial talent - the existence of which you can't control, but you can certainly control how you develop that talent and what use you make of it: you do this through practice, through listening, through reading and through adapting it to the task in hand.
2. The idea - the difference between a book that's easy to sell and one that isn't is mainly the idea, or concept. To some extent we don't control the ideas that come into our head. There's luck involved, but practice as well. There are two main controls we can have over the idea:

• giving ourselves time and space to think. I mean that rather literally - in my experience the best way to come up with good ideas is to go for a walk in open spaces. I've blogged about this here, and there's science behind it.
• knowledge as to whether this idea is one which will properly work as a story and one which a publisher will want. For this, you have to understand something of how publishers think and what they want.

You'd think that one way to discover this would be to ask them. Well, forget that. Why? Because they don't know. Publishers haven't a clue what they want - though they'll know what it is when they see it. So, let me tell you.

Publishers want something which is:

• different but not too different
  
• quirky but not too quirky, although wacky is fine as long as it's really wacky
• about a hamster
  
• sad but uplifting
• topical but not topical today - topical tomorrow
• following a trend - but not any trend that exists now, just whatever is going to be the next trend
• a fresh voice
• or a traditional one
• something that's never been done before
• as long as it's something which everyone agrees should have been done before
• and not something which hasn't been done before because it's stupid
• something that taps into the zeitgeist
• and something that makes us think
• but not too much
• something that will sell in vast numbers
• and which Tesco can sell along with cucumbers
• or something which very few people will want to read but will Be Important and which might, if it's a full moon, win the Man Booker, but if it doesn't will die
• the next big thing
  
• a book from a ten-year-old
• or an 82-year-old from Wales
• or a leggy blonde
• or a raspy-voiced unshaven young man with sexy eyes
• or, preferably, a celebrity with many plastic bits, who will not interfere with the writing of the book
  
• a trilogy but only if each is written as a stand-alone in case they have to drop Books 2 & 3
• a book they can sell really, really, really easily
• or something entirely different from any of the above but which ticks some boxes as yet unknowm to man.

And if you have the talent to guess what the answer might be, you are very lucky indeed.

By the way, I am quite sure that one of my favourite blog-readers, Dan Holloway, is now jumping up and down. He is going to make a comment to the effect that this is precisely why he chooses not to use traditional publishers. But the thing is, Dan, it's not just publishers who don't know what they want until they see it: it's readers.

Publishers, like readers, really want something quite simple: a rattling good book to get stuck into. And they don't know what it is until we write it.

So, off you go, everyone. Go for a long walk, come back with a fab idea, apply your talent, and then hope for luck.

(Apologies for any typos - I had to rush this post out because I'd accidentally hit publish instead of save before dashing off to do some school events - but several people on Twitter had already seen the title and were clamouring for the post, so I've rushed it out....And now I MUST GO).

WHEN AN IDEA IS NOT A BOOK

The most common question people ask writers is, "Where do you get your ideas?" For a long time I struggled with finding a helpful and polite answer to this question. (Before you say it: I know, I struggle to be polite at the best of times.) My instinct, depending on how crabbit I was feeling at the time, would either have been, "From my head, duh!" or, "Oh, I don't know, really - they just sort of come to me, ya know?"

It's not a stupid question, but it's a mystifying one for a writer. After all, an idea is just a thought and for writers and non-writers equally our thoughts come from all sorts of places but happen in our heads. So, for a writer as much as for a non-writer, a thought can be triggered by something you hear or read, or something that happens, or something that you found yourself thinking about for some reason. Sometimes you know what triggered it and sometimes you don't.

But I do now have an answer to the question and it goes to the heart of this blog post.

It's something that Brahms apparently said. Now, I heard this many years ago, so I'm not sure why I didn't think of using it to answer the "Where do you get your ideas" question. I even imagine that Brahms was actually answering that very question when he gave this answer, but what he said was (and I paraphrase because my German is nein-existent),

"The idea comes to me from outside of me - and is like a gift. I then take the idea and make it my own - that is where the skill lies."

And it very much is like that for writers. Having ideas is easy - everyone has ideas. And so often, and infuriatingly, non-writers say to writers, "Oh, you could write a book about that." No, not unless the idea can be turned into an appropriate story, because a story is not just "something interesting that happens". An idea is not a story any more than a seed is a tree.

So, where do I get my ideas from? Ideas come because I open my mind to them; I am greedy for them. Ideas are like seeds blown on the wind: they can land almost anywhere. And when a seed lands, which seems at first as though it might grow into a story, I have to process it, like watering it and nurturing it. It needs time and all the right conditions. If I fail to give it the right conditions, or if it turns out to have been a weak seed in the first place, then I will need to discard it and move onto to a more fruitful idea.

Because, importantly, not every idea is a book. And this is a very big mistake that some beginner writers make. They (and non-writers) might think, "Ooh, imagine a woman having surgery without anaesthetic in the early nineteenth century, and her young son hearing her screams and watching her die of blood-poisoning five days later. What would that do to his life?"

That's an idea. (In fact it's the idea that begins my second novel, Fleshmarket.) But it's not a story. A story needs fleshed out characters that you care about and can make your reader care about, each character with his or her own backstory and motivation; it needs a setting and a rich environment; it needs strands and a sub-plot or two; it needs direction and form and pace and a voice. It needs to have a point and a reason why a reader would spend money and time reading it.

When you have your idea, your seed of a possible story, you need to do two things with it:

1. Be totally inspired by it - because you're going to have to live, breathe and dream it for months.
2. Think it through, logically and skilfully, working out shape and direction and looking ahead to possible problems. Many writers will write the plan out, but not everyone does this. I don't, but I do spend many, many hours thinking things through, analysing what will work and what won't. I spend that time living the idea in my head, even if I haven't worked the plot out. If the idea is strong enough and the characters real and whole enough, then I know I can grow it into a full story - but part of that knowledge comes from experience. If you are a beginner gardener, you may find it harder to identify the healthy seed at the start. Beginner writers may find themselves spending too long nurturing a dud idea.

I'm going to say that again because it's perhaps the main point of this post: Beginner writers may find themselves spending too long nurturing a dud idea.
 
This blog post was triggered by an excellent piece over at Kidlit. Please go and read it. Now you might think, "Why do I need to read about writing for kids? I'm a fully-grown adult author." If you think that, I'm sorry to say that you betray an extreme ignorance of the writing process and its demands. Only in the details of age-pitching are there any differences between writing for any age group. We all work to the same standards - in fact, I'd argue that in many ways the standards you have to adhere to in children's writing are tougher. Anyway, in terms of ideas becoming fully-grown stories, what Mary at Kidlit has to say is utterly applicable.

So, my answer to the ideas question is now: "Getting ideas is easy: everyone does it. It's growing an idea into a story that takes time and skill and determination."

People also say that getting published is a combination of talent, luck and hard work. I'd go so far as to say that the only really lucky bit is the moment the idea comes - as Brahms says, like a gift - and everything else is the talent and hard work.

To illustrate something of what I've been saying about how ideas come and how writers process them, can I ask you to go over to Jane Smith's blog, where I relate the very lucky moment which sparked the idea for Wasted, my latest novel? Unfortunately, you can't put comments there any more because Jane is moving her blog over to a fab new website, so do come back and comment here. Please! It does illustrate how luckily an idea can come and how the idea sometimes needs a long, long time to grow. If I'd written the book when I first had the idea - before I was ever published - it would have been very different and I very much doubt it would be getting the reviews that Wasted is getting. That idea really did need nurturing and I don't think I could have done it all those years ago.

Luckily, I didn't!

MORE ON OTHER WRITERS GETTING THERE FIRST

To be honest, this is really an excuse for showing you this fabulous video, which I came across via Jonathan Pinnock's comment beneath my recent post about writers having the same / similar ideas and whether this matters.

Have a gander, and then I'll reveal why it's relevant.



Fab, eh?

And now, if you go here, you'll see why it was relevant to my recent post.

Done that? Wasn't it remarkably lucky that the domain name www.mrsdarcyvsthealiens.com was still available?? What were the chances of that? I really do think you should go and have a little read of the serialisation - it's great fun. I know Jonathan through Twitter but confess I'd never got round to reading the Mrs Darcy stuff because a) I'm not a Jane Austen fan, not even a little bit and b) I am not an alien /sci-fi fan. Shows how our preconceptions can work against us. What I learnt was that it doesn't matter what genre we're fans of: when the writing is right, nothing else matters.

Finally, while we're on coincidences AND the ubiquity of ideas, I have another story: while I was away on Friday, I got a lovely email from a crime writer who hadn't read my post about "someone getting there first", though I know he occasionally does read my blog. (He doesn't need to - he's very successful and needs no advice from me.) He told me that he'd been thinking for some time about writing something about Burke and Hare, and during his research he'd come across my novel, Fleshmarket. He then said some rather wonderful things about Fleshmarket but added that I'd now completely put him off writing the subject himself, because I'd "totally nailed it". I should probably suggest that he does read yesterday's blog post, because then he'd find out that no one has ever nailed anything - there's always another way.

Obviously, for writers there's a risk when we read things that have any chance of being too similar to what we're doing. Because if we haven't read something similar, we can be quite free with what we do. Anyone who writes about Edinburgh in the 19th century is likely to use much of the same detail, because how else other than with truth can we describe how things were? Thing is, we also have to read around our subject and see what other people have done, not only to make sure we do something different but to follow that rule: read widely in your genre. We have to know, even if the knowledge is sometimes painful.

So, all this problem of whether our idea is new or new enough or sufficiently "undone" is tricky, and has no simple answers, other than the use of common sense, integrity and artistic magic. I firmly believe that wide reading is essential for a writer, even if it reveals that someone does seem to have "got there first". That ugly moment is one that be overcome - a creative writer's brain will find a different way to do it. In fact, I emailed that crime writer back, told him he definitely should tackle Burke and Hare, that it would be very different from mine and that I would buy it. And from his response, I know he will. He wants to and he should. After all, Burke and Hare is not my story and many people have used it before. It just needs to filter through and merge with all the things in his creative mind that are different from what's in my mind, and he'll come up with something entirely his. And I can't wait to read it!

Meanwhile, to contradict all my hitherto reassuring advice, I am now in a state of terror because I have just had a high-concept idea for a high-concept series and this really is something that I think could only work once... If I discover that anyone else has done it or has the idea before I get my act together, there may be a whole lot of screaming.

NO! SOMEONE GOT THERE FIRST!

You might call this a horror story: The Terrifying Spectre of Someone Getting There First.

One of the heart-stopping moments in any writer's life - for unpublished as well as published bods - is when one hears that another author is about to produce a book which sounds horribly, terrifyingly, teeth-gnashingly similar to the one we are writing or planning or dreaming of. Our instinct is to believe that this is The End, and that we must now ditch the fabulous idea.

No. Calm down. This is real life. It happens and it doesn't matter, because your story will be different (unless you are actually going to read it and steal from  it). To understand fully, read the inimitable Editorial Ass explaining why it's no cause for concern.

I have my own story of extraordinary coincidence which I have written about before. Rather than send you away to that blog post, I'll copy the relevant bit below. (Note: I was writing from the perspective of the issue of plagiarism, but my point about not worrying if you discover in advance that someone is writing something that sounds similar, is equally relevant.)

____________________________________ 

THE EXTRAORDINARY COINCIDENCE
In October 2002, my first novel, Mondays are Red, was published. I'd been writing it during 2000/2001. Being unpublished, and not knowing any published author at all, let alone a stellar one like Tim Bowler, I had no way of knowing what any other author was writing in the privacy of his/her own garret.

Mondays are Red is a Young Adult novel about a 14 year-old boy called Luke who has synaesthesia.

A month later, in November 2002, Tim Bowler's umpteenth novel, Starseeker, was published. He had also been writing it during 2000/2001. (For those of you who don't know the business, any book published in November would already have been printed by October. Unless it's the biog of Michael Jackson.)

Starseeker is a Young Adult novel about a 14-year-old boy called Luke who has synaesthesia.

Because they were published in consecutive months, we had some joint reviews (hooray for me, debut author being reviewed and interviewed alongside TB!) but no one accused the other of plagiarism, because it obviously wasn't, because a) it couldn't have been, time-wise, and b) despite the identical descriptions above, they are two utterly different stories. Couldn't be more different. (Unless mine had been about a fifteen-year-old girl called Lucy with synaesthesia.)

But it's worth considering the following:

• if Tim's novel had come out while I was still writing mine, I'd have changed the name and probably the age of the protagonist because the last thing I'd want is to appear to plagiarise - and I'd have panicked, horribly; I might even have cried;
• next time you hear that two stories have the same motif / theme / premise, don't leap to the conclusion either that one is plagiarising or that they will actually be the same - unless they are;
• similarly with the horrible word "derivative" - nothing stands entirely on its own. No author is an island. Yes, some are unduly influenced, sometimes conconsciously, and occasionally some actually steal, which is disgraceful. But some influence is legitimate, inevitable and right. Writing and ideas are contagious, but they will mutate in the environment of a different mind.

There's a funny ending to this story
Tim and I became good friends and discovered we thought in many ways alike. "That's not very funny," I hear you say. No, but when I became friends with him I was writing another book, which had the provisional title of Apocalypse.

Luckily, authory friends tend to tell each other what they're writing.

"What you writing at the moment, Tim?" I asked.

"It's called Apocalypse," he replied. "It's about ..."

And since his Apocalypse was coming out before mine, guess who decided to change her title, even though there's no copyright on titles? It became The Passionflower Massacre. Much better. Who'd want to call a book Apocalypse anyway? Silly man.

 _________________________________

So, the fact that the concept sounds the same says nothing about whether the story is going to be in any way the same. It's most unlikely to be the same in any important way if you simply happen to have had the same-sounding idea without reading it.

My next novel, Wasted, has a concept which makes it sound like the film Sliding Doors and the book Dice Man. I haven't read Dice Man yet - though I will, after Wasted is published. I did see Sliding Doors years ago, mainly because I first started writing this book about 15 years ago and people kept saying, "You should see Sliding Doors". In much trepidation, I did. I needn't have worried. Yes, the underlying concept sounds similar, until you read the book and see the film and then you realise that nothing apart from the underlying concept is similar at all. Sliding Doors follows two possibilities, each equally "true", Wasted looks at one "true world", with many what ifs disappearing into nothingness.

Am I worried that Dice Man may turn out to have some unpleasant similarities? Well, if you want me to be honest, I am a little. But if I follow my own advice, I shouldn't be, should I?? All I know is that I was writing the idea before Dice Man was published and have been fascinated by causal determinism and theories of chance since I studied philosophy at University. So, if there are any similarities, they will be interesting but nothing to worry about.

So, if you decide not to worry about similar ideas, I won't either. OK?

(NB: I'm away today and tomorrow, doing school talks and meeting a publisher. )